Texts:
It's frustrating, as a preacher, as a writer, as a reader, when the words on the page seem to simply lay there (as they seem to be today, for me). I suppose this is even more frustrating when one believes that the Word actually does something and actually changes something and actually tells something about who we are and whose we are. Sometimes the text is silent. These times, for me, are some of the most challenging times.
I wonder if the Word does something because it comes into the lives of people who reflect, react, and argue with the text. It shapes who we are as we read it, and how we read it shapes how we understand it. We cannot read the Bible unbiased, nor can we truly point to the "simple reading," of the text; our "simple readings" are quickly complicated as they become used as arguments against our neighbor (the last time I read it, the Bible says nothing about utilizing its words to fuel hatred or judgment, but rather to love and protect our neighbors. Perhaps my biases prevent me from seeing where the Bible says this). We reduce the narrative to a limp, lifeless Word that speaks only of death, only of being right, only of proving wrong.
Whatever our hopes for the Bible, it subverts them, refusing to allow us to pin it down. It brings us face to face with our innermost selves, with our enemies, with our neighbors, with our God, and draws us into relationship. Perhaps this is why it is so frustrating when the text seems silent. It seems to me the text is rarely silent, but it sometimes asks us to take a long and hard look into ourselves, exposing us to its light, exposing our judgments of others, exposing our presumptions of how it should be read and what it all means in order that we might see that it is not we who act upon the Word but the Word that acts upon us. It makes our lives more complicated, more messy, and more true. It prevents us from dispassionate discussions of what it means because there is something at stake in what it means. I wonder, though, how we can engage each other in passionate conversations, and yes, even passionate arguments, about this Word, because it is worth arguing for. Inasmuch as it is worth arguing for, in what ways can we argue for and with the text without reducing it to a blunt object to bludgeon our enemies? Is there a way to have something at stake in the text without making it into something that determines we are "right" and someone else is "wrong"? I think it is when we allow the text to be bigger than ourselves and when we recognize that it does something to us and not us to it that we realize it is worth arguing for because it is for us, not in that we can utilize it to oppress and marginalize others, but precisely because we cannot.
Now, it must be said: I am painfully aware of how the Word has been - and continues to be - used to harm, to kill, and to destroy. This, however, is what happens when it is manipulated and used to one's own end. Rather than allowing it to do something to us, we attempt to do something to the Word. Here, the Word (captial "W") is reduced to a word (lowercase "w"), not what God says, but what we say. Not what God does, but what we do. This word does not live; it takes life. This word does not ignite the spirit, it quenches it. It does not point to God; it points to our selves and our desires for power over another.
So, silent as the Word may seem, perhaps it only seems silent because we are too busy shouting over all of our own noise to listen.
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